Bernard Cadet

By Bernard Cadet

For contemporary psychology, decision-making represents behaviours, which are very different from automatic responses. They are developed by implementing integrative cognitive functions adapted to the finalities sought and the situation to treat. Through the diversity of epistemological choices for instance, research in previous decades focused on the individual choices expressed by situations or contexts with a stable structure. The new problems of life in today’s society lead to making decisions on societal problems (climate, energy, etc.), which bring into play systems and no longer variables. This chapter has four aspects. After having characterised the decision-making process as a cognitive behaviour (1), having recalled the best known traditional models (those of Economics and Psychology) (2), this chapter deals with the properties of complex systems (globality, interactivity, dynamism, and scalability), which render decision-making difficult (3), and concludes with the necessity of a change of paradigm by pointing to paths to follow (4).

Part of the book: Decision Making

By Bernard Cadet

Since around 1970, academic studies on decision-making have changed in nature. Whereas they used to be laboratory studies of selected situations giving rise to the expression of individual choices, nowadays studies focus on real situations. These situations are processed in their natural contexts at the time they occur. The decisions to be made concern generally social problems (for instance forest fires, maritime pollution or global warming). This mutation in the nature of situations studied requires a paradigm shift, which leads to elaborate decisions in complex, dynamic and evolving systems, even sometimes resilient to human actions implemented to control them. This chapter analyses, at individual and group level (crisis units), cognitive difficulties encountered by decision-makers in handling such situations. These situations consist in treating information by assigning them, from the outset, meanings (sometimes personal). This is done by looking for temporary interactions, while respecting the global nature of the situation, by focusing on knowing the properties of context as well as those of the temporal evolution of the system concerned. This chapter analyses a case study for which urgent and fundamental decisions could not be taken and proposes an interpretation in terms of paradigms. Previous studies noted that the decision in complex systems, could entail paradoxes. This study on the decision-making dynamic shows that seeking objectivity, as defined under its current intangible form, does not produce a significant increase in the validity of choices made.

Part of the book: Advances in Decision Making

By Bernard Cadet and Isabel Cuadrado Gordillo

In numerous scientific disciplines, the decision-making process aims at choosing the most appropriate action to reach a defined objective is a central issue. Scientific literature demonstrates that a wide range of often prescriptive models is available to deal with this sequence. However, one category of situations, involving the intervention of complex, dynamic, and changeable systems (a forest fire for example) generate imprecisions, difficulties, or even incorrect decisions. This largely prospective chapter aims to study these situations from a cognitive point of view to reveal certain recurrent properties of their operation. These indicators may represent milestones for the construction of a new epistemology that would refer to the globality and the dynamism rather than to isolated and analytical entities.

Part of the book: Data and Decision Sciences